Diplomatic maneuvering between the Bourbon and Habsburg courts intensified in the mid-1760s as ministers on both sides worked to cement an alliance through marriage, eventually uniting Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette of Austria in 1770. The negotiations, protracted and layered with dynastic calculation, would produce a union that ended catastrophically in revolution and execution for both.
By the mid-1760s, France and Austria had reversed centuries of rivalry to become uneasy allies against Prussia and Britain, a diplomatic realignment known as the Renversement des Alliances. Sealing that alliance with a marriage between the Bourbon heir and a Habsburg archduchess was an obvious next step, and the courts in Versailles and Vienna spent years negotiating the terms, dowries, and ceremonial details befitting Europe's two most powerful royal houses.
The eventual bride, Marie Antoinette, was only a child during these early negotiations, one of Empress Maria Theresa's many daughters being weighed as marital currency in the great chessboard of European diplomacy. Neither she nor young Louis Auguste, then Duke of Berry, had much say in the arrangement that would define, and ultimately end, their lives. Their wedding in 1770 was celebrated as a triumph of statecraft; less than a quarter-century later both would die by guillotine, casualties of the revolution their marriage never anticipated and could do nothing to prevent.
Key people: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Maria Theresa